Contents

Political orientation

In a much-discussed speech delivered before she became prime minister, Thatcher had dismissed as incoherent the very idea of "social justice", along with a "progressive consensus" that regarded the notion as fundamental. (It is also worth ­remembering, incidentally, that in the early 1980s Thatcher had rejected proposals to protect marriage through the tax system, put to her by the then head of the Downing Street ­Policy Unit, Ferdinand Mount. Mount, who published an elegy to the lost "civilisation" of the English working class at about the time Duncan Smith was establishing the CSJ, has since worked with the think tank's social ­housing group in what he describes to me as a "fruitful relationship".)[6]